Parkdale, Scummy Parkdale

As promised, for those who attended the “Parkdale, Scummy Parkdale” Jane’s Walk event this afternoon but were not able to hear well due to the huge turnout or who just wanted a printed copy of your own, here are the reference notes I used on the tour.

Both documents include a recommended reading list if you would like to follow up on some of the literary and scholarly sources referenced. This material is drawn from my book, Imagining Toronto, and may not be reproduced or used without written permission secured in advance.

1 comment to Parkdale, Scummy Parkdale

You might want to make note of the following publications, of works set in Parkdale and about the neighborhood’s principal institutions.

1) Pioneers of Alienation and 50s Sci-Fi at Thing Street Asylum, most of which is set in the Parkdale neighborhood, is now available as a trilogy on Amazon. This work was available for a while (free!) from the Internet Archive, but had to be removed from that website because too many CROOKS were downloading it, any posting it elsewhere. It seems to be a common scam among the print-on-demand people, to steal works from living authors, by misrepresenting them as 19th-century texts, to evade copyright etc. The print-on-demand equivalent of DEATH OF THE AUTHOR?

2) The Support Worker of Emile Durkheim House: Daily Life and Death in a Group Home for Mad People, is a fictionalized treatment of life in a local, Parkdale group home. It was reviewed a while ago by Amy Greenwood, in Broken Pencil 41. It probably should be on your list.

3) Troping the Asylum: Authors and Authorities at the Toronto Asylum (1850-1920). This work is a history, but it discusses a lot of early writing by doctors and patients at the old asylum, that used to be just up the street, and whose grounds have recently been “transformed” by CAMH (that’s SCAMH!) into RETAIL COMMERCIAL SPACE.